THE WORD.

[First Paper. ]

NOTHING can be regarded as more significant than the new interest which, in the present day, surrounds the study of words. If old Verstegan and Pegge and Horne Tooke could now wake up, they would find themselves famous! Every man of science or philosophy now regards his statement as incomplete without a careful treatment of the bearings of the word. The Humboldts, F. Schlegel, and all the students of races, have made it one cornerstone of their respective edifices. Men of talent, such as Mr. Trench, have arisen in every country to revive for young students old and scattered etymologies; and in America we have at last a young thinker and enthusiast, who has the brave tone of a philological explorer. Our allusion is, of course, to Mr. Swinton, the author of the modestly-named work, Rambles among Words, whose gold, although it is not thoroughly washed-bearing also marks of hasty mining-is yet of a purer quality than that which any other venturer has brought back from this El Dorado.

A theorem of the word has arisen out of these accumulated histories and analyses, and a Theory of the Word is now the desideratum. There may be found in one or two writers generalizations which will furnish the naturalist of words, when he shall come, the bone from which the whole structure shall be deduced and described as when Emerson calls words "fossil poetry;" but as yet none of them have furnished a Philosophy of the Word. It is as a contribution in this special direction that this paper is intended.

The first hint of the vast range of this study meets us in the word WORD itself. It is through the Latin verbum, from vir, the word for MAN. We learn from the inscription over the temple we are entering, that language is a second and higher body which the soul puts forth for expression and self-realization. The word is the manifestation of man, and the true man was well called THE WORD. This explains well enough, also, that the newly-awakened interest in the investigation of words is the result of an age of consciousness. In no other way have we been able to draw so near to ourselves. I find that I was so altered in that dusky, oriental complexion, or that Greek and Roman costume-I was

so theatrical in France and savage among the aborigines, that I did not recognize myself; but having translated myself, ancient Judea and Greece, and other somewhat dim recollections of my past life, are made quite clear. Men have recorded of some barbarous nations that they have no history of their own origin and life; but this assertion only attests the infancy of our philological studies. Where there is speech, there is history; the record is as safely kept in the gibberish of Choctaw and Fejee as is the age of a tree in its rings. Our exacter histories are to theirs as a chronometer to the dial of Linnæus, which denoted the advancing and receding day by the opening and closing of flowers. In the day of life of these unconscious children, each high deed, or larger emotion, or more sacred conviction, when its moment came, flowered to its virtue in the heart and its word upon the tongue. Unlock the word, and you may not indeed find chronology, but you will inevitably find history.

There are, then, 66 по dead languages." As truly as the blood of every people which has existed still survives on earth, so truly do those noble thoughts, which Milton calls "the life-blood of noble spirits," live and throb in their words, and the richest bloom of intellectual men comes of a transfusion from these full arteries. Thus, though Horne Tooke may call his investigations of quaint derivations Diversions, the study of language itself goes deeper than letters and speculation, and demands something beyond literary acumen. Assyria, Greece, Rome, are dead; but the God to whose thought Assyria, Greece, and Rome were but a pictured alphabet, is not dead! To the mind which can spell out that thought from the languages to which it was confided, each true spelling is a gospel or God's-spell. Thus we bear with us. into our studies the spirit of that old Greek, who, having visited with his friends the temples of the gods, came with them to his own lowly door, and said, "Let us enter, for here also are the gods." Not alone in the seemingly grander temples of science or theology are treasured the wondrous revelations of God to man, but the every-day speech of men, obscure or eminent, is the full garner of the joy that has descended, as the golden apricot is garner of the sunbeams and dew-drops and wind and rain that have descended upon it.

"One accent of the Holy Ghost

The heedless world hath never lost."

One of the oldest traditions concerning the origin of language is that verse of Genesis (ii. 19), where, in the figurative style of the Hebrew, we are told that Jehovah brought all his creatures to Adam, "and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof." This is no doubt true; but if the historian had been an ordinary profane Anglo-Saxon, he would have transmitted the fact far less grandly, and made the matterof-fact statement that God brought all creatures to Adam to be named, by giving him eyes to see them, and ears to hear them; and that, by the coöperation of personal necessities, each thing signed its own distinctive autograph on his mind. That was its name or noun. This is certified by our knowledge that children first learn to utter names, and that the vocabularies of savage tribes consist mostly of names-i. e., nouns. Sensation, which is first, gives nouns in imitative accordance with the most salient impression of the object. Action, which succeeds sensation, and marks the entrance of will, gives verbs which are nouns in motion or action. Reflection gives adjectives and adverbs, which first assert that the man which distinguishes and chooses is born. The noun, verb, and adverb are distinct periods in the geology of words, and must have demanded for their formation ages proportionate to those which were occupied by primary, secondary, and tertiary in the earth.

Here rises the question, by its ability to answer which, of course, any theory of language must be judged: How came these words to express their special objects or emotions? The doctrine that words were given arbitrarily by any one man, or diffused by any generation of men and transmitted by their children, does not pretend to rest on a philosophical basis, and therefore may be left to sink or swim with the credit of the traditions which are supposed to establish it. The idea of a supernatural gift of words from the Creator must be excluded, by the frequent imperfections of words in expressing the true nature of their objects. For example, the word used for the heavens in the Old Testament, correctly rendered firmament, represents the belief of the writer that the sky was a solid arch: a conclusion sufficiently attested by other portions of the book in which it is declared that this wall separated the waters above from the waters beneath, and in which, when rain is spoken of, it is said that the windows of this firmament are opened. Of course, a miraculously-given language would be

scientifically correct. One question, then, arises back of these fancies; this question, namely, Why should firmament be the word to express that which is solid, or circle what is circular, or man man?

I think that our only recourse is to suppose a radical connection between the senses; that the sight, or touch, or associations of an object suggest the sound which most fitly represents that object, and the form, perhaps, of the letter which is, as it were, tap-root of the word. God geometrizes, said Plato; and since that note was sounded the beautiful coördination of all thingsof mind and body, and their varied faculties: eye gathering seven colors of its spectrum, ear gathering seven notes of its gamut, and the like analogues-has been the theme of every poet who has followed. Things exist as poetry before they exist as science; and this identity of the senses, a sequence to the fundamental unity of all things, has long been familiar to poetry, whose office is to recognize unity under diversity. Wordsworth describes a shaking leaf as making "eye-music;" Madame de Stæl a cathedral as "frozen music"-Coleridge having before called it a "petrified religion;" in which phrases one sense is made the complete symbol of another. We doubt not that it will one day be considered far from absurd that many have described the noise of thunder as black, and that a blind man said that he imagined red to be like the sound of a trumpet. We would suggest, then, that whatever prominent traits, or characteristics, or habits objects may have, furnished their nominative sounds. There is a hiss, in nearly all languages, in the word for a serpent-snake, anguis, schlange, sarf, sarpa, etc.; the s being the hissing letter, and of imitative serpentine shape; thence, by derivation, the words which include, by enlargement, the sneaking (snake) and creeping (serpens) habits of the animal. An illustration of a name derived from the eye may be gathered from the old Italian writers, who affirm that the Latin word for man, 'omo, is derived from the form of the human face-each eye being an O, and the sides of the face with the nose resembling an M.

But the imitative origin of words would be rendered probable by the imitative origin and shape of letters themselves. And it is quite certain that the nearer we get to the primitive alphabets, the more we observe their descriptive character. We will take,

for an example, the Hebrew, which includes the whole Syriac family, and also the Greek-the latter being but modifications of it:

1., alaph, Greek A, alpha, signifies in the ancient Chaldaic tongue a ship, but in the Hebrew a bullock, which among the Hebrews bore burdens, as ships did with the Chaldees. It is probable that the letter was in shape originally intended to be a compromise between an ancient ship and an animal with a burden on its back.

2., beth, Greek B, beta, is a house, like which, though toppled over, it looks.

3., gimel, Greek г, gamma, a small bridge in the ancient Arimaic language, and camel in Hebrew.

4. 7, daleth, Greek ▲, delta, from deleth, a door, and in shape an open door.

5., hai, signifying here it is. This letter seems in its shape to refer to the house beth with the door open in one corner, when compared with the second letter.

These five letters present a related series of images: one starts from the ship to the house, he passes a small bridge in order to reach it, and having opened the door, here he is in it. In the next six the image is changed to the in-door habits of the people. 6. 1, vov, a nail, which it resembles.

7. †, sayin, a club, to which the likeness is plain.

8., heth, fire-tongs; so in shape.

9. D, teth, Greek, chi, the fist; the resemblance to the closed hand is evident.

10., yod, Greek I, iota, the handle of a pan, evidently.

11., kaph, Greek K, kappa, a plate.

After the man is in the house, he hangs his arms or club on the nail, takes the fire-tongs with his fist, and lays hold of the handle of the pan, then takes his meal from a plate.

12., lamad, Greek A, lambda, the cane or switch.

13., mem, Greek M, mu, the water-the resemblance being,

however, rather to the mast and spread sail.

14. 1, nun, Greek N, nu, the fish.

15., samech, Greek Σ, sigma, thick.

16. y, agin, the eye.

17. 5, peh, Greek, phi, the mouth open, and catching something.